iWWDC: Devs flock to iOS for ease of development and monetization

Philip Elmer-DeWitt relayed on the Fortune blog a survey that Piper Jaffray’s resident Apple analyst Gene Munster conducted during Apple’s annual developer conference which took place in San Francisco last week. He compared the results to a similar survey conducted in 2008, when Android wasn’t on the map yet. Speaking to 45 iOS developers attending this year’s conference (versus the twenty developers he surveyed at WWDC 2008), Munster wrote in a Monday note to clients that only seven percent of respondents write Mac apps these days. That’s a notable drop from 50 percent in 2008 and a major shift towards favoring Apple’s mobile operating system. Perhaps Apple should rename the conference as iWWDC? Go past the fold for more takeaways…

When it comes to non-Apple platforms, nearly half of polled iOS developers – or 47 percent – write Android apps and more than a third (36 percent) develop for Research In Motion’s BlackBerry. Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 and Hewlett-Packard’s webOS get little love from developers, with only 13 percent and seven percent supporting those respective platforms. Worse, not a single developer named RIM or HP when asked to single out platforms they thought could grow in the future.

It’s all coming down to the iOS/Android duopoly, with 51 percent thinking iOS has the highest potential for future growth and 40 percent for Android (Windows Phone scored nine percent on that question). It’s also interesting that 36 percent are developing exclusively for iOS, up from 30 percent in 2008. Symbian? Four percent develop for that. Every single one iOS developer says Apple’s platform is best for ease of development and monetization. And asked about app rejections, 38 percent pointed out Apple’s strict limitations as their biggest complaint about the App Store, but only 11 percent – or one in ten – are dissatisfied with the approval process per se.